The shape had grown small. Now it looked like nothing recognizable. He did not know how long it was before he saw the blackness thin, and bits of white showed through, shining in the sun — yes, there was the sun just up, glowing over the rocks. Why, the whole thing could not have taken longer than a few minutes.
He strode forward, crushing ants with each step, and brushing them off his clothes, till he stood above the skeleton. It was clean-picked. It might have been lying there years, except that on the white bone there were pink fragments of flesh. About the bones ants were ebbing away, their pincers full of meat.
The boy looked at them, big black ugly insects. A few were standing and gazing up at him with small glittering eyes.
“Go away!” he said to the ants very coldly. “I am not for you — not just yet, at any rate. Go away.” And he fancied that the ants turned and went away.
He bent over the bones and touched the sockets in the skull: that was where the eyes were, he thought incredulously, remembering the liquid dark eyes of a buck.
That morning, perhaps an hour ago, this small creature had been stepping proud and free through the bush, feeling the chill on its skin even as he himself had done, exhilarated by it. Proudly stepping the earth, frisking a pretty white tail, it had sniffed the cold morning air. Walking like kings and conquerors it had moved freely through this bush, where each blade of grass grew for it alone, and where the river ran pure sparkling water for it to drink.
And then — what had happened? Such a sure swiftfooted thing could surely not be trapped by a swarm of ants?
